LFHM: Fruit Flies, Epilepsy, & Consciousness

January 31, 2014 @ 11:30 am - 1:30 pm

Modeling is an ubiquitous tool in science for understanding complex systems. An animal system is like the fruit fly can model complex interactions between environment and genetics in human disease. We are using a fruit fly model for epilepsy known as bang-sensitive mutants to illuminate the connection between nervous system excitability and nutrition.

These flies undergo seizure and paralysis upon stimulation and exhibit shortened lifespan and neurodegeneration; however, these symptoms can be modified by diet. The effect of diet is most likely due to modulation of mitochondrial defects in the mutants, demonstrating the importance of cellular function in a systematic disease. Computational models can also be used for examining complex systems. In addition to our in vivo approach, we have developed a new measure of informational flow using toy neural networks and graph analysis. we are using this measure and its implications to understand how epilepsy or sleep might disrupt consciousness.